Irish and British Report the Collapse of Talks

By JAMES F. CLARITY

Published: November 17, 1992

DUBLIN, Nov. 16—
Irish and British officials today acknowledged the collapse of nearly two years of talks aimed at a peaceful settlement of the 23 years of civil war in the British province of Northern Ireland.

The talks, a major British initiative started in early 1991, were held intermittently until last week by the two Governments and the political leaders of the Protestant majority and the Roman Catholic minority in the North.

The talks achieved first meetings ever between hard-line Protestant leaders and Irish ministers, but the symbolic event was not followed by substantive progress toward power-sharing between Protestants and Catholics in the North. Since 1969, more than 3,000 people have been killed.

Today, ranking Irish and British officials met here under the provisions of the 1985 British-Irish Agreement, which operates independently of the peace talks and which gives the Dublin Government a consultative role in the affairs of the North.

Both Foreign Minister David Andrews of Ireland and Sir Patrick Mayhew, the British Secretary for Northern Ireland, acknowledged for the first time that the talks had broken down. They hastened to say they hoped that they could be resumed, but gave no indication of when or where.

Instead, they seemed to suggest that the collapse last week was related to the eruption last weekend of unusually heavy violence by the Irish Republican Army, which is predominantly Catholic, and a Protestant paramilitary group, the Ulster Freedom Fighters.

On Friday night an I.R.A. bomb devastated several buildings in the commercial center of the northern city of Coleraine. On Saturday, the U.F.F. attacked a bookmaker's shop in a Catholic section of North Belfast, killing 4 people and wounding 14. On Saturday night, the I.R.A. killed a Royal Ulster Constabulary officer on duty in the rural area southwest of Belfast.

Mr. Andrews, referring to the collapse of the talks, said, "We've got to insure that if there's a vacuum out there, that that vacuum is filled by politics and politicians and that it not be left to the men of violence, orange or green." Those are the respective patriotic colors of the Protestants and the Catholics. He added that he and Sir Patrick had "addressed the need to get back into the talks, as a matter of considerable urgency."

Sir Patrick said, "Terrorists, orange or green or any other color, have got to be defeated." He and Mr. Andrews, he said, were "absolutely of one mind about that."

The collapsed talks were supposed to produce a new institution for power-sharing between the province's 900,000 Protestants and 650,000 Catholics. Britain has ruled the province directly since 1974, and has about 12,000 army troops there on combat duty. They were also supposed to improve relations between the Protestant leadership, which wants to remain part of Britain, and the Republic of Ireland, whose Constitution claims sovereignty over the North. -------------------- Germans Charge Four

KARLSRUHE, Germany, Nov. 16 (AP) -- The federal prosecutor's office said today that it had charged four reputed Irish Republican Army members with attempted murder in a 1989 bomb attack against the British Army in Germany.

The four are accused of taking part in a bombing at the British Army's Quebec Barracks in Osnabruck, about 80 miles south of Bremen. No one was hurt in the attack.

The statement said they four belonged to the Provisional Irish Republican Army, a radical I.R.A. splinter group, and had banded together in 1989 to carry out attacks against British military sites in Europe.

Ms. Maguire is on trial in Dusseldorf on charges connected with the murder of a British Army major shot in Dortmund in June 1990. The other three are being held in France, and Germany has requested their extradition, the statement said.